Traffic exchange programs are those websites which promise to bring visitors to your website in exchange for you visiting the websites of other members of the exchange.  In other words, for every X websites you visit you will be rewarded with a number of people being directed to your site.

This is touted as a great way to generate traffic to your website - and no doubt it does.  When we experimented with a traffic exchange program we very quickly increased the number of visitors to our site by about 20 or 30 per day.  Of course this is just a drop in the ocean and hardly worth the time it took to manually click through a few websites.

Furthermore, one wonders if the quality of the traffic is such that it is even worth pursuing.  It seems likely that the majority of people visiting your site are only doing so to get a “credit” towards directing a visitor to their site.  Such visitors are hardly likely to convert on your website and are just generating meaningless hits on your site.

It doesn’t matter if your website gets a million hits every day if none of the visitors are taking the time to even look at your content.

So at the end of the day it seems that although traffic exchange programs will increase your traffic (marginally) there is unlikely to be any real financial gain from this traffic.  Your SEO efforts would be better spent in drawing visitors to your site who are interested in what you have to offer than bribing people to click your link.

Tags: SEO, traffic

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 1:58 am by Bertus Floor and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.